Community Manager: What He Does & How To Become One?

The Community Manager is a figure of great responsibility because he must manage and support the growth of a brand’s fan base: this means being able not only to monitor sentiment better but also to direct it, thanks to ad hoc strategies and content, to appease spirits in the event of a crisis and to be indeed the voice and face of the company on social networks.

When it comes to Social Media, there is a tendency to simplify significantly the figures who work in this complex and multifaceted area, flattening everything into a single “mythological” resource, the Social Media Manager, who should be a sort of hydra with many heads: creative, strategist, graphic designer, analyst and much more… The reality is that every aspect of the social media marketing activity has its reference specialist: the Community Manager is the person in charge of monitoring and nurturing the community.

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Who Is The Community Manager: Differences With Other Social Media Marketing Figures

Knowing the difference between a Community Manager and a Social Media Manager is essential. Often both roles indeed merge into one, but there are some differences in responsibilities and daily activities:

The Virtual Entertainment Chief thinks up the methodology for every single social channel, and the Local area Director is the person who will incorporate it. On the off chance that the first is a more vital and “hypothetical” figure, the second is more functional and all the more genuinely inside the local area;
Virtual Entertainment Chiefs pick the instruments that Local area Directors will use to foster their work, for instance, the executive’s stages, whether to utilize Hootsuite or Cradle;
The People group Chief guides interchanges and activities to a particular crowd that the Virtual Entertainment Director has recently characterized and fragmented;
Ordinarily, the Virtual Entertainment Chief characterizes and deals with the financial plan for the execution of the system; with regards to paid crusades, the Local area Supervisor can, without a doubt, give criticism and do A/B tests to comprehend what works best locally unambiguously.

Similarly, the Community Manager usually does not create the graphics, videos and creatives that make up the editorial plan, just as he does not write the copy of the posts he will publish: all the creative production is usually carried out by specific figures, real Social Media Content Managers.

How To Be A Community Manager?

Social Networks are the primary working tool of this figure, which aims to improve a brand’s visibility in the digital world, particularly on social channels. Although they do not usually create the content themselves, the Community Managers are always looking for new trends and news about their sector; they are responsible for mapping trends and analyzing competitors to be able to provide their fan base with the freshest and most exciting information.

They are concerned with increasing the number of faithful followers, i.e. active users who leave comments and like their brand. How? Creating engagement through exciting and interactive content and generating employment through different formats and techniques, such as surveys, giveaways, quizzes and, in general, stimulating the community’s desire to have their say on a topic. The most complex side of this work is undoubtedly the interaction and monitoring of comments: responding to user posts and interacting with them necessarily means, more or less often, running into crises and negative feelings towards your brand or product.

Daily tasks of the Community Manager

Resolving these crises online, responding to complaints and defusing haters is a very delicate process, which must be done wisely, always following company guidelines and with the right tone of voice. Not only that, disputes can often occur not directly against the brand but between users: preventing and resolving potentially dangerous situations, in which violent comments, racist or real insults could be made, is one of the responsibilities of the Community Manager.

Summarizing, therefore, these are the daily tasks of the Community Manager:

Pay attention to what the Net is saying about your brand through specific sentiment monitoring tools;
Inform the company about what is relevant on social networks, new trends, information and ideas that will help elaborate the social media marketing strategy;
Respond to the digital community, being the Community Manager of the image and voice of the brand;
Find new potential fans/followers;
Support the creative department in defining new, increasingly innovative and engaging social content;
Knowing how to manage a crisis on social networks without making the common mistake of reacting too quickly or aggressively;
Periodically monitor and evaluate the results on social networks, examining statistics and insights to obtain valuable metrics for further improvement.

The Biggest Challenges Of A Community Manager

Not only haters to quell or complaints to manage; this is part of the job; the most significant challenge that a Community Manager faces, in reality, is often the lack of support from the company. Called to launch and grow a community, many times the Community Manager finds himself alone without permission from the organization, that is, without clear business objectives to pursue, without clarity on the values to be shared, without a team to rely on, without the budget to be able to implement the actions needed to create “community”.

The last challenge, and not least, is the idea that the work of the Community Manager is measured on the receipt. Of course, the economic return aspect is as important as any activity you decide to invest in. Still, in this case, more time is needed because first, you must create relationships and only then will it be possible to see the financial results.

How Do You Become A Community Manager, And How Much Do You Earn?

It is a job of great responsibility, which has a lot to do with managing brand reputation. Therefore, abroad a Community Manager with medium-high experience can aspire to a respectable salary. In Italy, unfortunately, as always, some digital professions are seen as minors: this is the case of this figure, for example, wrongly considered as “easy” and therefore often proposed to new hires and very Junior resources – which sometimes, not out of ill will but out of simple lack of expertise, it can result in natural online reputation disasters.

The Advantages Of Having A Community Manager In The Company

The substantial difference between the public and the community is that those who are part of an audience have an individualistic approach to the brand to acquire information or personal advantages. Those who are part of the community have a generous approach guided by a common purpose that unites and drives people’s actions toward each other. Developing a community means creating relationships around a value proposition. This entails considerable advantages for the company: the increase in engagement, the possibility of acquiring relevant feedback for product innovation, the opportunity to help the product/service to grow through the co-production activity, the offer of more efficient customer support, last but not slightest possibility of taking advantage of a pool of people intensely involved in the brand from which to draw talents.